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What's Eating Richard Ripple

by Corvus B.

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    light pink hand-assembled cassette
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    homemade CD release of the album with printed artwork and maybe a few flowers or doodles.

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1.
birch trees look like cigarettes growing from your fingers and when we walk you're a scarecrow that watches over people a wool sock stuffed with pine needles i wanna hold your straw bones and watch you watch things grow and tell the moon it sounds like a megaphone bridge water makes a mirror of a honeycomb and ghosts have been sewing all my pockets closed trees fiddle with kite strings when they think no ones listening for wood creaking and joints shedding splinters but i've been up for a while and it's hard to not hear them
2.
the wood of this pew is warmer than my priest's glass eyes stained panes straining with the shaking of an organ coughing dust clouds from disuse and I'm wearing a skirt and I'm nervous and thinking that creaking knees arent louder than stomachs and that I don't think God wants my palm sweat psalms wet with self fulfilling faith jizz stranger, feel how strong my god is as we shake hands and I pretend im steady in my skin i couldn't find holy until I left a congregation i found it in my basement collecting in my fingertips the night I almost left and I found it In cars vibrations from standing on highway bridges trying to feel my pulse as something bigger than just goosebumps i found alive in getting out of bed on all the days I wanna die and forcing myself to walk outside until there's no sole left in my shoes and I pray to the clouds now cause sunlight expects too much from me and God expects too much from me and I just wanna sit in the rain
3.
when the plane started falling the pilot gave up and told us to jump but the hatch was jammed shut so we sat and played with parachutes like kindergarten strangers cut out patches for our skinned knees hoping it was holey enough for some kind of salvation but the holes were hopeless so we folded the scraps into roses and watered our work with a business man's Bloody Mary as a fucked up prayer for some more time to grow but the ground doesn't care about God and God is just tired of I'm sorrys so you put your pressed palms back into your pocket and stared at the floor and laughed at how small we all are compared to our shoes
4.
they/them 02:28
I don't want my body anymore Someone's moved all my bones to the left And I'm a stranger in my house Bumping into end tables and elbows And wishing I didn't have pinkie toes I am guilty for being selfish I am guilty for wanting to forget im a person But forgetting feels a lot better than facing reflective glass and my Disjointed movements A lot of times the static still wins And shaking and fog replace my lungs and my hips And breathing is broken up into fractions and I find myself again On the bathroom floor of a convenience store Where I let the linoleum calm me down And left with nothing to show but tile lines on my skin A grid map of self decomposition I want to be a dead leaf Floating downstream Where I'll be just another piece of my surroundings And no one but the wind expects any life out of me And I won't feel bad about The boy that lives in this body The girl that lives in this body The things I have done to this body I am trying my best to be honest with this body I am learning how to live with my dissonance With how most of me is more comfortable more out of focus So no one has to see my legs or my cardboard organs And I can just find calm in being small And watching everyone else exist
5.
breakfast cereal and fake velvet chairs a clothespin on the tip of your nose tripping over dead flowers on the way to school later tonight there will be too many chairs to unfold and too many hands folded in the wake of stranger's soap operas too many aunts dressed like the couch cushions that grew out of the floorboards way before you were born and forgot how to learn new forms too many families that aren't yours you roll racecars over the handrail to hymns that have stopped feeling personal and the big room on the first floor is where everyone cries but you like to make snow angels in the heavy purple carpet and living here you got good at playing dead though you avoid the locked room at the end of the hall that your dog has never gotten used to when dad told you the guests weren't sleeping you started to tiptoe so you wouldn't anger the ghosts but when you moved out you missed the way cleaning your room used to be a goodbye to strange cadavers
6.
somethings been ringing for a while now but swinging at my alarm just reminds me how heavy my arms are and my fingers are curled around their own prune and I think i might be drowning but all i see are blues and reds and seahorses racing back from work to get back to their spouses and an octopus bagging groceries with eight hands an angler that can't find his glasses and some stingray listening to electronic music while old lady puffer fishes swell in agitation i thought i was scared of death but death looks more friendly now than it did when i was a kid there's something gentle about strangers forgetting i existed and someone replacing my body in all my favorite places wearing down leather car seats with a body shaped different than mine is and peeling back wallpaper with a new set of anxious fingers i like to think it's easy to forget me a lot of the time i forget me i can't feel real unless there's someone to remind me but right now i'm alone and the ache in my chest feels pretty convincing and my wet shirt is clinging to my back that's still clinging to existence all the dust is washing off the parts of me i thought i hated that i stuffed between my bed and the wall with lost socks and water bottles and forgot about until now but this is it the ringing sounds like church bells and the sun is somewhere I can't see so i just swallow and ask the fish to remember my name
7.
There's a small old woman Who wears a powder blue sweater And prays to the birds on her porch That her son might visit soon But his picture is on the mantle And his obituary is tucked in a shoebox Collecting dust in her closet She flirts with the diabetic man whose cat takes the same medication We sometimes feed it For five dollars While he goes on vacation To places hes been but forgotten He used to play chess with The smelly onion lady Who lets kids walk her dog As a last ditch wish for a little more youth Her ex husband plays poker on Wednesdays With the other old boys Puffing cigars on the front lawn And dealing clubs with calloused hands Drowning out domesticity With rusted flasks And no one talks to the veteran Who looks like his pit bull They carry weight on angry bones But the cracks around their eyes are gentle
8.
listen
9.
I stopped watching my gasoline eyelids blink back from puddles Cause asphalt makes me tired I'd like to make a home of the holes between cobblestones and doze To pepto bismol engines instead So they can take me to crayola gardens Where I can wear a whicker hat And evaporate into the landscape Till pollen and water cycles are all that matter to me Water droplets don't sneeze and don't have to say sorry An agnostic kind of purgatory A lumpy bed that feels right to me A mountain made of shoulders and the dim glow of window sleep Bells bring fake wake ups from traffic cones and sticky notes Into loose socks and sunlit railroads And I meet the earth as a balding old man Long settled into his freckled skin And no one here stops flowers from growing on female limbs We just laugh as spray paint coats our glasses And hope that when it rains something stays behind with us even if it's just eye crust and loose rocks I'm afraid of waking up And leaving the sunken part of my mattress for the sun Even though I know it'll keep the hair on my arms calm I just wanna put my pocket lint in a jar so I can remember all the places I traded places with dust So I can stare at the blue fuzz And remember my body thought it was worth keeping once I keep a lot of things I'm not sure I want And misplace a lot of things I need Like passports in foreign countries I wanna lose some parts of me without feeling guilty And just get to know the condensation collecting on my window seat

about

kathleen, you're the pf flyest
max, we can retire now
emma, you had me at geometry
kathleen's dad
rob, you're a good driver
valerie flor, thank you. a lot.

a lot of these poems are about death but now im really glad to be alive.
thank you for listening.

credits

released June 3, 2016

Printing Shed (printingshed.bandcamp.com) - Poetry, Vocals
Valerie Flor (valerieflor.bandcamp.com) - Music

Recorded in a basement
*no screens were harmed in the recording of this album

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Corvus B. Massachusetts

queer spoken folk from the mouth of the Merrimack River

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